Author Archives: Ida Torres

A Folding Chair Designed to Stay Out, Not Hide Away

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I have a complicated relationship with folding chairs. Not a hostile one, just complicated. They are one of those objects that exist in a permanent state of apology: useful when you need them, embarrassing when you don’t, and almost always the first thing you hide before company arrives. The folding chair has never quite managed to transcend its reputation as a placeholder for “real” furniture, and for decades, most designers haven’t really bothered trying. That’s what made the Kael Walnut Folding Chair by Esspur stop me mid-scroll.

It doesn’t announce itself as a folding chair. If you saw it sitting in someone’s dining room, you’d probably assume it was a permanent fixture, a considered purchase, a statement piece. The seat and curved backrest are solid walnut, warm in tone and shaped to suggest permanence rather than portability. The frame is polished stainless steel, slim and structured without feeling cold or industrial. Taken together, the chair reads more like something you’d find in a well-edited boutique hotel lobby than something you’d unfold for a dinner party and tuck back behind a door before your guests could notice. The proportions are right. The materials are at least photographically convincing. And the overall silhouette holds a kind of quiet confidence that most folding chairs never come close to.

Designer: Esspur

The design carries echoes of mid-century classics, and those references don’t feel like a stretch. There’s a rotational elegance to how the chair collapses that feels deliberate, almost theatrical, as if the whole point of the folding mechanism is to be watched. That’s not a common quality in budget-adjacent furniture. Most folding chairs fold in the most graceless way possible, a series of clicks and reversals that feel like you’re solving a problem rather than using a product. The Kael seems to understand that the fold is part of the design, not an afterthought.

Esspur is a brand with virtually no history and no disclosed location, and their online presence raises more questions than it answers. The product description calls the seat and backrest solid wood in one place, then references veneer craftsmanship in the fine print. I think that’s worth sitting with for a moment. We live in an era of very convincing product photography, and the gap between how something looks on a screen and how it feels in your hands has never been wider. The walnut might be veneer rather than solid. The steel might feel lighter than it looks. These are legitimate concerns, and if you’re the kind of person who expects heirloom-grade furniture, this probably isn’t it. Shopping from an unknown brand with no verifiable track record is always a calculated risk.

But here’s the thing I keep turning over: the idea itself is nearly flawless. Whatever the material quality ends up being, someone thought carefully about the problem of the folding chair and came up with a solution that doesn’t feel like a compromise. The design respects the object. It doesn’t try to disguise the fact that it folds; the mechanism is visible, structural, part of the aesthetic. But it also doesn’t apologize for it. That’s a harder line to walk than it looks.

For anyone living in a city apartment, a studio, or a home where space is a constant negotiation, the Kael makes a quiet argument: good design shouldn’t require a permanent footprint. The best extra chair is one you’d want to leave out even when you don’t need it. Most folding chairs fail that test spectacularly. This one, at least in concept, passes with something to spare.

Whether Esspur refines the build quality over time or quietly disappears from the internet, the design itself has already done something useful. It’s asked the right question: what if the folding chair wasn’t the awkward option, but the intentional one? It’s a question the furniture industry hasn’t had much urgency to answer. Maybe now it does.

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CamelBak and Crayola Just Made the Most Nostalgic Water Bottle

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Remember holding a fat crayon between your fingers as a kid? The waxy smell, the satisfying peel of the paper label, that specific weight in your hand that felt like pure creative possibility? CamelBak and Crayola are betting you do, because their new limited-edition Chug Water Bottle Collection is practically a love letter to that memory.

The collaboration transforms the classic crayon into functional hydration gear, and the execution is genuinely clever. The standout feature is the lid shaped to mimic the iconic Crayola crayon tip, a small but deliberate design choice that does a lot of heavy lifting. It’s not just a slap-on logo deal or a crayon-print graphic splashed across a generic bottle. The actual form of the crayon is carried through to the cap, which makes it feel like a real design statement rather than a quick licensing cash grab.

Designer: Camelbak x Crayola

The collection comes in three sizes: a 14oz, a 16oz insulated stainless steel version, and a 25oz option made with Tritan Renew plastic. The 16oz model is vacuum-insulated, keeping drinks ice cold for hours, while the larger 25oz is lightweight and non-insulated, ideal for someone who just wants a grab-and-go bottle without the extra weight. Both are BPA-free, and the 25oz is built with Tritan Renew, which incorporates reclaimed plastic material into its construction. That feels like a thoughtful nod to sustainability, and it’s the kind of detail that tends to get overlooked in the excitement over aesthetics.

Where the collection really delivers is in the color palette. Crayola didn’t just hand over its logo and call it a day. The bottles arrive in shades pulled straight from the classic 64-count box: Cherry Red, Carnation Pink, Sky Blue, Aquamarine, Green, and more. These aren’t muted, “adultified” interpretations of those colors. They’re unapologetically vivid, exactly the kind of saturated tones that made opening a new box of crayons feel like an event. For anyone who has strong feelings about how many “adult” product lines water down color until it becomes something beige and forgettable, this collection is a welcome counter-argument. It’s rare to see a brand commit fully to the bit, and Crayola’s signature palette, deployed here at full intensity, is genuinely satisfying.

Nostalgia-driven collaborations are everywhere right now, and they can be exhausting when they feel cynical. A well-known consumer brand slaps its logo on something unrelated, leans hard on your childhood memories, and hopes the emotion carries the sale. The CamelBak x Crayola partnership sidesteps that trap because the two brands actually share the same lane. Both are built around accessibility, creativity, and the idea that the best products go everywhere with you. Crayola has been a household name since 1903, and CamelBak has spent decades designing hydration products that live in backpacks, gym bags, and school hallways alike. Putting them together isn’t a stretch. If anything, it’s the kind of collab that makes you wonder why it didn’t happen sooner.

The pricing sits at around $28 for the insulated 16oz bottle and closer to $19 to $23 for the 25oz Tritan version. Neither is bargain-bin territory, but they’re reasonable for what you’re getting: a genuinely well-made hydration product with design details that go beyond surface level.

Is this a bottle that will change the way you think about hydration? No. But that’s also not the point. The CamelBak x Crayola Chug Collection is a product that understands the quiet power of play, that the objects we carry around every day say something about who we are and what we choose to care about. Choosing a water bottle shaped like a crayon is a small, deliberate act of joy, and in a product category that has been dominated by matte black cylinders and relentless “wellness” branding, a little color goes a long way. Literally. The collection is limited edition and available now on Amazon and through CamelBak’s website.

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An Office Wall That Moves, Opens, and Looks Like Art

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The first thing you notice about FLIP is the texture. The BRICKS panels that make up the surface are three-dimensional, each unit raised and grooved in a pattern drawn from the form of actual building bricks. Up close, the natural hemp and flax version has the kind of warm, sandy grain you’d expect to find in a high-end material library rather than a commercial office. The blue rPET version reads more like a dense, structured felt. Both are bold design choices, and neither looks like anything already sitting in a conference room near you.

FLIP is a modular acoustic wall system designed by Anna Vonhausen and Maciej Bidermann for Polish brand VANK, and it earned a Green Product Award 2026 for good reason. The premise is straightforward: instead of installing fixed partitions or accepting the noise chaos of open-plan offices, you build walls that move, reconfigure, and open up exactly when you need them to. The mechanics behind the name are literal. Individual panel segments are hinged so they can pivot open, creating access points within what would otherwise be a solid wall. No door frame required, no architectural work, just a flip.

Designers: Anna Vonhausen & Maciej Bidermann

The modular base system rolls on castors, which means entire configurations can shift whenever a space needs to change. You can build a straight wall, an L-shape, a U-shaped focus nook, or a more enclosed collaborative zone depending on how you connect the screens. The panels link together using a visible horizontal rail system that runs between each row, and those rails do double duty as mounting tracks for a range of black metal accessories. The shelves sit cleanly within the panel grid without protruding awkwardly or breaking the visual rhythm of the wall.

The accessory system is one of the more considered details in the whole design. Small angular shelves clip directly onto the rails and sit flush against the brick surface, giving users a place to rest a lamp, a plant, or whatever makes a temporary workspace feel less temporary. It shifts FLIP from a partition into something closer to a personal environment. The surface is also pin-friendly, meaning the fabric panels pull double duty as a work wall where mood boards, documents, and references can go up without any additional hardware.

The curtain option adds another layer of flexibility. A slim overhead rail can be fitted to the top of certain configurations, suspending a draped curtain that softens the threshold between zones. It doesn’t seal a space off completely, but it creates enough visual and acoustic separation to make a focus nook feel genuinely sheltered rather than just screened. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

On the acoustic side, the three-dimensional surface structure isn’t just decorative. The raised geometry of the BRICKS panels disperses sound waves rather than absorbing them in a single flat plane, achieving a sound absorption coefficient of αw = 0.90. The double-sided construction means both faces of the wall are performing at the same time, and the acoustic performance has been confirmed through scientific modeling rather than just cited on a spec sheet. For a mobile, reconfigurable system, that’s a serious number.

The color range deserves attention too. Natural hemp sits at one end of the palette, a warm sand tone with visible fibre that shifts in different light. At the other end are deep charcoal and vivid yellow rPET options, along with mid-tone grey and a saturated blue. Mixing finishes within a single configuration, which the system fully supports, produces results that look intentional rather than accidental.

FLIP won its award in the Workspace category, but the system is flexible enough to work in retail, hospitality, or any environment that needs fast spatial zoning without permanent construction. Vonhausen and Bidermann built something that performs well, looks even better, and treats the office wall not as background infrastructure but as a designed object worth your full attention. That’s a harder brief to fulfill than it sounds, and FLIP pulls it off.

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6 Murano Glass Lamps That Glow Without a Single Cord

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If you’ve ever wished your lamp could double as a sculpture, or that a piece of Venetian craft could actually travel with you from room to room rather than stay anchored to the nearest outlet, Flowers in Wonderland might just ruin every other lamp you’ve ever owned. Not dramatically. Just quietly, the way really good things do.

Designed by Alessandra Baldereschi for Multiforme, the collection is made up of six table lamps, each shaped like an unopened flower bud and hand-blown in artistic Murano glass. They come in soft pastel tones, they’re touch-activated, and they glow. Quietly, beautifully, and completely without a cord.

Designer: Alessandra Baldereschi

That last part matters more than it sounds. Portable lighting has been around for a while, but most of it still skews practical or industrial. A camping lantern. A rechargeable desk light you forget to charge. The cordless lamp category hasn’t exactly been known for elegance, or for the kind of visual impact that makes you actually want to own one. Baldereschi’s Flowers in Wonderland steps into that gap with a very different idea of what a portable lamp can look and feel like. These are objects you place somewhere because they’re beautiful, and the light just happens to be part of that.

The Murano glass angle is worth sitting with. Venice’s glassblowing tradition goes back to the 13th century, when the city relocated its glassmakers to the island of Murano to reduce the risk of fire in its densely packed streets. The craft has stayed there ever since, producing work that ranges from decorative to ceremonial to, yes, commercially mass-produced. What Multiforme does differently is keep the handmade core alive while pushing the design language somewhere genuinely contemporary. Each piece in the collection is hand-blown, which means no two are exactly alike, and the light that filters through the glass carries a warmth and depth that manufactured materials simply can’t replicate.

Baldereschi herself is a Milanese designer with a sensibility that’s harder to pin down than most. She trained at Domus Academy in Milan, one of the more rigorous design schools in Europe, and then spent time in Japan developing ceramic tableware with companies in the Gifu district. That combination of Italian craft tradition and Japanese restraint shows up quietly in her work. She brings a precision to how she handles materials, but also a kind of playfulness that keeps things from ever feeling stiff. Her portfolio spans glassware, décor, and lighting, and she’s shown at the Triennale di Milano, the Seoul Design Festival, and the Moss Gallery in New York. She’s not a newcomer with a single viral moment. She’s a designer who’s been building a coherent body of work for decades.

Flowers in Wonderland premiered at Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, which is already a statement. It then went on to win the Curiouz Award at Venice Design Week 2025, a recognition dedicated to the most innovative projects in contemporary design. The win acknowledged the collection’s ability to combine technology and craftsmanship in a way that doesn’t feel like a compromise. Usually, when a product leans hard into one, it sacrifices the other. Here, the battery-powered portability and the centuries-old glassblowing technique feel like they belong together.

The collection comes in six flower shapes, each capturing a bud that’s almost open. Not fully bloomed, not completely closed. That specific in-between moment is where Baldereschi seems most interested, and it translates beautifully into objects that feel like they’re holding their breath. You want to place them on a windowsill, a dining table, or a nightstand, and then just watch the light shift as the day changes around them.

Lighting design rarely gets the cultural attention it deserves. We spend a lot of time talking about furniture and architecture, and considerably less thinking about how the quality of light in a room actually shapes the way we experience it. A lamp like this makes that conversation unavoidable. You can’t ignore it. You don’t really want to.

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Adidas Just Squared the Stan Smith. It Actually Works.

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The Stan Smith is one of those shoes you either already own or have owned at some point. Originally developed as a tennis shoe in 1965 under the name Adidas Robert Haillet, it became one of Adidas’s most recognizable silhouettes of all time, outlasting trends, entire aesthetic movements, and decades of fluctuating fashion without ever really trying. It’s clean, it’s white, it’s unmistakable. So when Adidas announced the Stan Smith SQ, a version with a deliberately squared-off toe, the reactions were predictably split between “finally” and “why would you do that.” I land firmly in the first camp.

The square toe has a longer history than most people realize. Evidence of blunt-toed footwear dates back over 1,700 years, with roots in Japan, and the style resurfaced periodically over the centuries, including in Victorian women’s shoes and later through rodeo culture, where square toes were practical for balance and foot movement. In the modern era, Martin Margiela made it a high-fashion statement with his square tabi shoes, and that influence never quite went away. Now, with brands across the spectrum embracing exaggerated silhouettes and unconventional geometry, the square toe is very much back in serious conversation. Adidas didn’t just chase a trend here. They attached it to one of the most recognizable shoe silhouettes in existence, which is either a genius move or a bold gamble, probably both.

Designer: Adidas

What makes the Stan Smith SQ work is that Adidas knew where to stop. The rest of the shoe is essentially untouched. You still get the glossy white leather upper, the signature Three Stripes perforations along the side, the green heel tab, and yes, the actual photograph of Stan Smith on the tongue. The update is a single, precise edit: one geometric shift that changes the entire energy of the shoe without erasing everything that made it iconic in the first place. That kind of restraint is harder to achieve than people give designers credit for. It’s easy to overhaul. It’s much harder to know which one thing to change.

The squared toe box introduces a sharper, more structured profile. It makes the shoe feel less sporty and more fashion-adjacent, which is clearly the point. For a sneaker that has spent decades straddling the line between athletic and everyday wear, the SQ version leans confidently toward the latter. It reads as intentional in a way the original can’t always pull off, given how casual and effortless its default vibe tends to be. Put the Stan Smith SQ on with a clean outfit and it doesn’t just blend in, it actually finishes the look.

There will be people who find the square toe awkward, and I get it. Rounded toes are familiar. They feel safe, anatomical, expected. The square version asks you to commit to something a little more deliberate, a little more fashion-aware. It’s the kind of shoe that signals you’ve thought about what you’re wearing, even if the rest of your outfit is as simple as jeans and a white T-shirt. That’s not a bad thing to communicate.

At $130, the Stan Smith SQ is priced in line with the original, which is worth noting. This isn’t a luxury reimagining or a limited collector release. It’s a widely accessible design update dropping in the classic white and green colorway for Summer 2026. That accessibility matters. It means the square toe gets a real audience beyond the fashion insiders who already knew the Margiela reference. It puts the idea in front of people who just want a good shoe that looks considered, and that’s a much broader and more interesting conversation to be part of.

Whether you’re a sneakerhead, a design enthusiast, or just someone who likes footwear that looks like it was chosen on purpose, the Stan Smith SQ makes a quiet but confident case for itself. Not every update to a classic needs to be revolutionary. Sometimes the most interesting design decision is a single, deliberate line drawn somewhere it hasn’t been before.

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Cash App Just Made a $25 Magic Wand You Pay With

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Payment technology has largely been invisible work. Tap your phone, swipe your card, wave your watch, done. The entire industry spent years making transactions faster and more frictionless, which mostly means less noticeable and decidedly less fun. So when Cash App announces a pearlescent, star-tipped wand that you wave at a payment terminal to buy your morning coffee, the question isn’t whether it’s practical. The question is why nobody thought of this sooner.

Launched on June 4, 2026, the Cash App Wand is the first in a new line of NFC-enabled payment accessories called Cash App Tags. It links directly to your Cash App Visa Card, works wherever Visa tap-to-pay is accepted, and costs $25. It clips onto a keychain, comes in a shimmery pearlescent finish, and has a light green faux gemstone set into its star-shaped tip. It looks like something you’d find halfway between a tech startup and a fairy godmother’s toolbox, and that combination is entirely the point.

Designer: Cash App

The official pitch targets Gen Z, a generation that, according to a Cash App survey, purchases collectibles, accessories, or limited-edition items at least monthly more than any other generation. It’s a cohort that treats personal style as a form of currency in itself, which makes the Wand feel less like a tech release and more like a fashion drop. The Wand isn’t really trying to replace your wallet. It’s trying to become something you actually want to wear. That shift in thinking, from payment as utility to payment as personal accessory, is genuinely significant and not just a marketing exercise.

I’ll be honest: my first reaction was mild skepticism. A wand feels gimmicky, and a $25 accessory that does exactly what your phone already does doesn’t automatically justify its existence. But the more I sat with it, the more I think that skepticism is beside the point. Technology rarely wins on function alone. The Apple Watch wasn’t the first smartwatch. AirPods weren’t the first wireless earbuds. Neither succeeded purely because they worked. They succeeded because people wanted to own them and be seen with them. The Wand is operating from the same playbook, and it knows it.

There’s also a practical case buried underneath all the whimsy. Venues where phones are restricted, packed music festivals, gym bags without pockets. Situations where digging for a card or unlocking a screen takes just a beat longer than the moment allows. Cash App highlights the Wand as a solution for ordering merch at festivals or grabbing food at phone-free events. A small, lightweight accessory that lives on your keys and taps to pay solves a real friction point, even if the star shape isn’t strictly necessary for solving it. The magic is optional. The convenience is not.

Cash App says the Wand is just the beginning. The hardware lead at Block, Cash App’s parent company, described the form factor possibilities as “nearly limitless,” citing everything from clothing to jewelry as potential future payment vehicles. That’s a bold statement, but not an unreasonable one. The underlying NFC technology is the same tech already living in your phone and card. The design is the only real variable, which means the ceiling here is limited only by imagination and production ambition.

The limited-edition framing is smart, too. By releasing the Wand in small batches to Cash App Card holders before a wider summer rollout, they’ve created a sense of scarcity that turns a payment device into something closer to a drop culture moment. Whether that reads as cynical or clever probably depends on your relationship with limited releases, but it works. People are already talking about it.

What the Wand really represents is a quiet but pointed argument: that the objects we interact with every day, even purely functional ones, deserve more thought about how they look and feel. Fintech has spent so long optimizing for speed that it forgot to optimize for delight. Cash App just remembered. The Wand is available now for $25 through the Cash App, while supplies last, for eligible customers aged 13 and up.

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Gustav Friebel’s Red Lamp and the Art of Breaking Light Apart

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The first time you look at Gustav Friebel’s Hands On Light, you might do a double-take. Is it a lamp? A science experiment? An art installation that somehow found its way onto a side table? The answer, satisfyingly, is all three, and that is exactly the point.

Hands On Light is Friebel’s contribution to the exhibition of the same name, a master’s cooperation between ERCO, one of Germany’s most storied lighting manufacturers, and UDK Berlin (Universität der Künste). Fifteen prototypes were shown at Berlin Design Week 2026, each one exploring what the project called the “Alchemy of Light.” Friebel’s piece stood out immediately, not just for its color (that urgent, almost aggressive red) but for what it asks you to think about when you look at it.

Designer: Gustav Friebel

The concept is grounded in natural light segmentation. Think of the way sunlight hits a cluster of bubbles on water, or how dappled light falls through a canopy of leaves. Each point of light is distinct, separated, alive. Friebel took that idea and made it structural. Seven frosted glass spheres, each with polished sides, sit inside the holes of a deep-drawn PMMA sheet. That sheet, the red one that catches your eye first, is not a simple tray. It is a sculptural form in itself, its organic rounded edges suggesting something molten, like a material caught mid-transformation.

The glass spheres do something genuinely clever. The frosting diffuses the light, softening it into a gentle glow, but the polished sides of each sphere allow light and color to interact in a way that feels less like engineering and more like physics made beautiful. When the lamp is on, the red of the PMMA bleeds into the milky glass, and the whole thing pulses with warmth. Lit or unlit, it reads differently. That duality is not an accident.

What sits beneath all of this is also worth paying attention to. The base is a chrome metal armature with a sculptural quality of its own. The supports branch out from a cylindrical foot, holding the whole assembly with a kind of studied asymmetry, like a model of an atom or something lifted from a lab. A red braided cord runs through it all, tying the color story together from bottom to top. Disassembled and laid out flat, as the photographs show, the components look like they belong to three different design languages. Assembled, they resolve into something surprisingly unified.

The collaboration context matters here. ERCO brings with it a serious design heritage. Otl Aicher, one of the most influential visual designers of the 20th century, is among those connected to the company’s tradition. That background gives the brief real weight, and you can feel it in the work the students produced. This was not a decorative exercise. The project pushed students to engage with light as a raw material, not a byproduct. Friebel clearly took that seriously.

My honest read on this is that Hands On Light sits in a genuinely interesting space between functional object and conceptual statement. The lamp works. It lights a room. But it also asks you to reconsider what a lamp is supposed to do, and whether utility and spectacle have to be in tension with each other. I do not think they do, and this piece makes a strong case for that position.

Lamps tend to be the most overlooked objects in interior design, bought last and thought about least. Friebel’s piece argues, quietly and colorfully, that they deserve better than that. Light is not just a utility. It is a mood, a texture, a quality of space. When a designer approaches it that way from the very start of the process, you end up with something that earns a second glance, a third, and eventually a permanent spot on your wishlist.

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Crocs Just Entered the Mushroom Kingdom and We’re Into It

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Crocs and Nintendo are not brands you’d typically put in the same sentence as “high-concept design collaboration.” And yet here we are, with the Crocs x Super Mario collection dropping July 15, 2026, looking far better than the premise suggests it should.

The announcement landed earlier this week, and the first reaction — at least my first reaction — was that resigned nod you give when two things that were always meant to go together finally figure it out. Crocs has been quietly rebuilding its cultural credibility for years through a series of increasingly clever partnerships, and Super Mario is the one IP on the planet that genuinely belongs to everyone. People who grew up with a Game Boy, adults who still boot up Mario Kart on a Friday night, and people who have never touched a controller but know exactly who Mario is. That kind of universal ownership is rare, and landing it on a foam clog might be the smartest move either brand has made this year.

Designer: Crocs x Nintendo

Five styles make up the collection, each built around a specific character, and the level of detail is more than you’d expect from a licensed shoe drop. The Mario clog sits on a blue foam base with a plush version of Mario’s signature red cap attached directly to the upper — playful without being costume-y. The Yoshi style goes full green with PVC fins running along the upper, which somehow manages to feel sculptural rather than silly. Then there’s the Bowser clog: dark green foam, seven PVC spikes on the upper, and five more replacing Jibbitz on the strap. Bowser would absolutely approve.

Princess Peach gets the most elevated treatment, with a platform sole finished in pink glitter and seven exclusive Jibbitz charms. It reads more fashion than novelty, which is a genuine design achievement for a shoe that has a question block on it. Rounding out the group is the Core Classic Clog, which pulls from the game’s broader iconography — coins, stars, turtle shells — and comes with eight Jibbitz charms and an option in kids’ sizing. The right call.

Pricing runs from $55 to $90, which lands comfortably in impulse-buy territory for any adult who will absolutely tell themselves they’re buying it for their kid.

What makes this feel considered rather than purely commercial is how naturally the characters map onto what Crocs already does. Crocs has never been a brand that does subtle. It’s loud, comfortable, and entirely unapologetic about existing. Nintendo’s Super Mario roster operates the same way. These are characters drawn in primary colours with maximum personality and zero pretension. They don’t need your endorsement. So when Bowser turns up as a spike-covered clog, it doesn’t feel like a brand sticking a logo on a product. It feels like the character found the right medium.

The Jibbitz element is doing quiet but important work across the collection. Each pair ships with six to eight exclusive co-branded charms, which means every clog doubles as an entry point into Crocs’ customisation ecosystem. Crocs has always understood that Jibbitz turn a shoe into something personal, closer to a wearable mood board than just footwear. Giving Super Mario fans a way into that system is smart, and it means the collection will live well past its launch date.

I’ll be straight: I did not expect to be genuinely interested in a pair of foam shoes shaped like Yoshi. I expected novelty for children and maybe a few nostalgic adults grabbing one on a whim. What the collection actually delivers is a thoughtful translation of game design into product design — character-specific textures, shapes, and details that suggest someone actually played the games and asked what it means for a shoe to feel like a character, not just look like one.

The Crocs x Super Mario collection is available from July 15 on crocs.com, the Nintendo Store, and select retailers globally. Your feet are going to the Mushroom Kingdom.

The post Crocs Just Entered the Mushroom Kingdom and We’re Into It first appeared on Yanko Design.

3-in-1 Cardboard Pot Just Made Plastic Pots Obsolete

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The plant pot is not a product most people think about reinventing. It holds soil, it sits on a shelf, and eventually you wrestle it off the root ball and toss it in a bin. End of story. But three design students from Münster School of Design looked at that ordinary object and saw something worth fixing, and the result is POT+, a 3-in-1 recyclable cardboard plant pot that manages to be both surprisingly clever and genuinely necessary.

Sophie Greif, Paul Sommerfeld, and Paula Storm developed POT+ over just eight weeks as part of a course on sustainable cardboard packaging. Eight weeks is not a lot of time. It barely covers a single design iteration at most studios, which makes what they produced even more impressive. The concept is straightforward: a biodegradable, glue-free cardboard pot that doubles as a scoop and includes a built-in plant tag. Three tools, one object, zero plastic.

Designers: Sophie Greif, Paul Sommerfeld and Paula Storm

The plastic plant pot problem is bigger than most of us realize. Most of those thin, flimsy pots that come with supermarket herbs or garden centre annuals are not recyclable. They fall into a category of plastics too contaminated with soil and organic material to process properly, so they end up in landfill. Billions of them, every year. Environmental groups have flagged this as one of the garden industry’s most persistent and overlooked waste problems, and yet the plastic pot has remained almost entirely unchanged for decades. We have essentially built a throwaway infrastructure around plants, which is a genuinely bizarre thing to do for products sold in the name of nature.

POT+ addresses this directly and without fanfare. Made from 100% recyclable cardboard, it can be tossed straight into the paper recycling bin after use. It is water-resistant and stable for up to two weeks, which covers the window between purchase and repotting for most plants. Beyond that, the ergonomic design and integrated scoop make the actual task of repotting cleaner and easier. And the built-in plant tag is one of those small details that makes you wonder why it was not always part of the package. Anyone who has scratched a plant name on a popsicle stick and promptly lost it will know exactly what I mean.

What strikes me about POT+ is how it reframes the idea of sustainable design. So much green design falls into the trap of asking people to change their behavior significantly in exchange for a smaller environmental footprint. POT+ does not do that. The user experience is genuinely better: fewer tools to fumble with, a biodegradable pot that sidesteps the recycling bin debate, and a plant tag already built in. The sustainability is incidental from the user’s perspective, even though it is clearly the central intention from the designers’.

That alignment between good design and ethical design is harder to achieve than it looks. Students are often praised for one or the other, but rarely both. Sophie, Paul, and Paula merged perspectives from Communication & Product Design and Media & Product Design, which likely accounts for the final product feeling as considered in its branding as it is in its function. POT+ has a clear identity. It looks intentional, not experimental.

The Green Product Award recognized it for good reason. But the more interesting conversation is about what POT+ signals for design education. Eight weeks, three students, three different disciplines, and a finished concept that could genuinely replace a product category. That is not a student project in the diminutive sense of the phrase. It is the kind of outcome that most professional design teams would be proud to put their name on.

The plastic plant pot has been a quiet environmental problem for decades, hiding in plain sight because it is so mundane, so ubiquitous, so easy to overlook. POT+ does not try to be remarkable. It just quietly gets the job done better. And right now, that might be the most useful kind of design there is.

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SharkNinja’s $499 Vacuum Now Comes in Colors Your Designer Would Pick

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Most home appliances are designed to be forgiven, not admired. You buy them, you use them, and when company comes over, you hope nobody notices the boxy gray robot charging in the corner or the utilitarian stick vacuum propped against the wall. That’s just been the unspoken contract between cleaning products and the people who own them: function first, aesthetics never. SharkNinja just tore up that contract.

The Shark Home Luxe Collection is SharkNinja’s first coordinated cross-category color initiative, and it’s a surprisingly considered move from a brand better known for suction power than style. The collection spans two of Shark’s most capable products: the PowerDetect UV Reveal robot vacuum and mop, and the PowerDetect Speed cordless vacuum. Both get a total of eight new colorways, split across the two products, and they are genuinely beautiful in a way that feels deliberate rather than decorative.

Designer: SharkNinja

For the robot vacuum, the shades are Espresso, Evergreen, Deep Harbor, and Ivory. The cordless gets Walnut, Oatstone, Sagewood, and Harbor Slate. Read those names and you’ll notice a pattern immediately: these are the exact same tones showing up in Japandi interiors, minimalist furniture lines, and the kind of design-forward spaces that get 400,000 likes on Pinterest. SharkNinja clearly did its homework. The names alone do half the marketing work.

Interior designer Jeremiah Brent was brought in to mark the launch, and his take on it cuts right to the point. “For so long, products in this category were designed to be hidden, when the reality is they live alongside us every day,” he said. He’s right. Robot vacuums don’t get tucked into closets; they sit in plain view on their charging docks. Cordless vacuums lean against walls in the hallway or the bedroom. They occupy space in the same rooms as carefully chosen furniture and lighting, and for years, the design language of those products has been completely at odds with everything else around them.

The Shark Home Luxe Collection doesn’t just slap a new coat of paint on existing hardware either. The finishes feel considered, the proportions haven’t changed, and the products underneath are legitimately strong. The PowerDetect UV Reveal is the first robot vacuum and mop to use UV light detection to identify hidden messes, including dried spills, pet accidents, and residue that standard sensors would otherwise miss. It vacuums and mops simultaneously, adapts in real time to different floor types, and the self-empty base holds debris for up to 45 days. Prices for the UV Reveal Luxe start at $1,299.

The PowerDetect Speed, meanwhile, is a 7-pound cordless vacuum offering up to 60 minutes of runtime, with PowerDetect Intelligence that automatically adjusts to different surfaces and cleaning directions. Its auto-empty base can go up to 45 days between empties. The Luxe version starts at $499.99.

Now, is a color refresh a radical redesign? No, and nobody is pretending otherwise. But that’s not really the point. The point is that SharkNinja is acknowledging something the design community has quietly understood for years: objects we live with daily should be held to the same aesthetic standard as everything else in our homes. A vacuum isn’t a utility hiding in a utility closet anymore. It’s furniture, essentially.

The broader trend here is one worth watching. Brands across categories, from air purifiers to kitchen appliances to Wi-Fi routers, are starting to understand that people want technology that integrates into a home visually, not just functionally. Dyson figured this out early. Now SharkNinja is making the same argument, at a wider price range and with a much clearer design vocabulary.

Whether the Shark Home Luxe Collection becomes a defining shift in how cleaning appliances are marketed, or whether it remains a smart but limited edition palette refresh, depends entirely on how consumers respond. My instinct says the response will be warm. Because given the choice between a vacuum that blends into your home and one that doesn’t, most people will choose the one that doesn’t make the room look worse.

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